


All the Time Between Us

by theexistentialqueer



Category: The Dalemark Quartet - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: F/M, i think the ending is terrible but i had no beta, i'm sorry this has no beta, look i just want a relatively happy ending, mitt's bad at deadlines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:19:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15909987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theexistentialqueer/pseuds/theexistentialqueer
Summary: Maewen's seventeenth birthday comes and goes, and Mitt does not come with it.





	All the Time Between Us

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really, really sorry if this is awful. I think the ending is terribly lackluster. I tried to find a beta and couldn't. I wish the ending was better. I did the best that I could. I hope you like it. There are parts I'm pleased with, but I wish I liked it more.

 

Maewen's seventeenth birthday comes and goes, and Mitt does not come with it.

She's not terribly surprised, she supposes. He's Undying, and time must be different for them. What are four years to two hundred? And if he's waited two hundred years just for her, she supposes she can't wait a bit longer for him.

( _Oh, but do hurry_ , Mitt, Maewen thinks, a bit desperately. She has cultivated patience the likes of which she never knew she could have, these last four years, but she is seventeen and he was supposed to find her now.)

Eighteen comes, and still no Mitt with it. Maewen gives a little sigh and settles herself in to wait. She starts at King's College, in Kernsburgh, that fall, double majoring in history and archeology. She has vague ambitions of grand discoveries of Hern's reign and after. On weekends she interns with her father's office at the palace. The other history students are all appropriately jealous, which makes Maewen flush. She takes to university life with verve and vigor, throws herself into her studies, makes good grades. Her father plods on with his family tree, with Maewen's help. She makes friends, and shows her friends round the palace. She briefly dates a boy named Arik, a keen young political science student with sandy hair, pale eyes, and teak-brown skin, and he's awfully nice, patient and obliging and eager to please her, but she feels vague and skittish around him and she breaks it off after three months, pleading a preoccupation with schoolwork.

Life settles into the same comfortable, achingly normal pattern that it's been for the past five years.

The years pass. Maewen spends one semester on a dig with her archeology advisor, hobbling about the Black Mountains and up and down the Aden, looking for sites of Heathen Haliglander communities. She writes her final thesis paper on Hern's unification of the Riverlanders and the Heathen Haliglanders, with a focus on Hern's political appointments of earls. She graduates with honors, and applies for the graduate program. Her advisor reads her undergraduate work and declares her possessed of uncommonly keen intuition of interpersonal politics. Maewen feels pleased, and nervous and freckly all over.

She turns 24, and takes a semester off to go back home to Adenmouth to spend with mum and Aunt Liss. The Harvest Festival approaches, and she decides to take a weekend trip Hannart to celebrate it, taking along one of the lurid and painfully inaccurate historical fictions she's taken to reading just because they make her blush and giggle and occasionally groan. This one is a tragic romantic epic of Manaliabrid and the Adon, who are both terribly tragic and terribly romantic, featured on the cover with a weepy Manaliabrid, bosom heaving, clinging to the well-muscled Adon, and Osfameron, who is a right sop. Maewen tries to picture Wend speaking with _thee_ s and _thou_ s and bursting into song every time Manaliabrid drops a handkerchief or the Adon flourishes his sword. She wonders idly if Wend has read any of this pulpy trash, and finds herself giggling at the thought.

Her face is in the book, the book pressed right up near her eyes, when she hears the sound of a body dropping heavily into the seat across from her, and Maewen suddenly feels tingly all over, her hair frizzing with electricity. She's afraid to put her book down.

"Paths of the Undying," the person with a lazy drawl in that voice so familiar it feels like swallowing buttery caramel, all warm and sweet. "Come here often, do you?"

Oh, One! Maewen feels even more nervous and freckly all over than she can ever remember feeling. A wild, desperate terror has gripped her. She gives a tiny nod, and then remembers her face is covered by a book. "Er," she says, "yes," voice weak, still unwilling to put down her safe little shield and knowing he's looking at the cover and knowing exactly what kind of rubbish she's wasting her time with. 

"Maewen," he says patiently, and she hears him shift in his seat, his leather jacket creaking. "Won't you please look at me?"

Maewen shakes her head furiously, curls rustling, then remembers he can't see her face again, and hiccups. "No."

"Well, and why not?" He sounds like a person talking to a scared animal, and there's a note of anxiety creeping into his voice. "What's wrong?"

Maewen blinks her burning wet eyes furiously. "Twelve years," she wails, her voice quiet and strangled and wet. "You said four."

"Ah," he says, tired and guilty. "Yes. I'm sorry. I was--I was a bit marooned, you see."

She doesn't know what this means. She wants so desperately to look at him, but he said four years, and it's been twelve, and she's shaking apart and afraid. She realizes sometime between seventeen and twenty-four, she's begun to think none of this was real anymore, that it happened to a different Maewen, a braver, stronger Maewen, and this is just what you get, isn't it. This is exactly what you get.

Her hands tremble. She takes a deep breath, and squints her eyes so everything is fuzzy, and slowly lowers her book.

She knows the shape of him so well, or the shape of him when he was almost fifteen, gawky and tall. Through the fuzziness of her lashes she can see he's filled out, but there's still a gawky something, and angled line to his face, a set to his shoulders, that is familiar. The pale moon of his face is pointed at her. She squeezes her eyes shut tight, lashes wet, and then opens them.

Mitt's face is pinched with unhappiness, and hopeful, and older, and dear. When he sees her opening his eyes, he flushes with relief, and smiles, and says, "There now. Better that I can see you now."

Maewen bursts into tears.

 

* * *

 

He had been coming to her in Adenmouth for the Harvest Festival, and when he got there and found out she'd gone away for it--to the baffled confusion of Aunt Liss, who did not know this disreputable-looking young man or what Maewen might have to do with him, as he had not the look of someone she might know from school ("A real sharp one, your aunt is," Mitt had said, whistling with approval.)--he had rushed to catch up with the train. How he had caught up with her she could not figure out, with the train all the way halfway to Aberath, but he was Undying after all, and peculiar things happened around them.

Mitt holds her hands in his, the fingers still long and knuckly, the skin rougher in some places and smoother in others. His face is more filled out, but the jacket hangs on him rather oddly, because he's still so bony from growing up poor. Altogether Maewen thinks, studying him closely, the dear sharp angles of his face, the way his skin pulls on it, tight here and smooth there, with a hint of worry lines, that he looks he could be twenty-nine or thirty. No wonder Aunt Liss had been so suspicious! She must think him too terribly old, not to mention disreputable-looking, to have any interest in Maewen. Aunt Liss is peculiar like that.

"I had to go south after I left the palace that day," he's saying, his thumb running little circles against hers. "I had to find another one of us for some information. And then I went to stay with Cennoreth for a bit, and then to the Isles, and time passes so oddly with them. By the time I left I'd got word of another pocket of Kankredin I had to go take care of, and I hadn't realized how much time had passed.

"Maewen, I'm sorry. Maewen, I'm so sorry."

She squeezes his hands. She's already forgiven him.

"I've been in school," she offers, feeling rather lame, because he's been on adventures and she's been reading crumbling old papers and dating records and stumping around in the dirt.

He looks bright and pleased for her. "Well, and what are you studying?"

"History," she says, feeling a little embarrassed. "And archeology. And folklore on the side."

Mitt gives a loud bark of laughter at that, not unkindly. Maewen flushes, and feels pleased. "A right expert on those topics, I bet you are! Stunning them all, I bet."

Well, and it's true. Her professors have nothing but praise for her. Her graduate advisor called her a genius of insight. And she is doing something rather remarkable, isn't she, getting to the truth of things that happened and making sure they were understood. It makes her feel rather less small against him.

Shyly, acting rather more a boy and rather less a man of two hundred, he lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it.

 

* * *

 

They reach Hannart together. The flowering trees and bushes are red and gold and orange and yellow, a riot of color that reflects off the glowing steam organ and drenches the whole city in warm buttery light. It's the second time Maewen has been, and Mitt's uncountable time to the city. It has a a homey, vintage look, the buildings squat and comfortable and old, with creepers growing up the sides, and brightly colored shutters. The old Earl's manor sits up near the top of the hill, gleaming in the sun. Maewen lifts her hand, joined with Mitt's, and points.

"That's where the Crown Prince stays, most of the time. He and the Queen don't get on."

"You know, I've heard that," Mitt says. "Lot of big babies, they are. Keril would have fits if he knew the Crown owned Hannart now. Hey! Look, that's Brid and Moril's school up the side of that hill."

He had avoided mentioning much of the past much these past few days, talking mostly about the immediate last few years. Maewen thinks he was doing it for her benefit. He thinks it would make her sad, everything she had missed on. And in a way it does, but it makes her smile too, to think of Keril getting a pinched lemon look on his face at the idea of Mitt's descendants getting Hannart. _Serves you right!_  she thought. _For trying to make Mitt do such a vile thing._

Oh, but Kialan would probably have been terribly sad. She had liked Kialan rather.

Mitt is looking at her anxiously now, and she knows she was right. Well, and he shouldn't avoid talking about it just for fear of upsetting her. She tells him so.

"It's only," he says, "you weren't there for it, and you were supposed to build the palace and the city, and then I watched them all die while I didn't, and I don't want to make you sad. I've waited too long, to just make you sad."

He is dear, and considerate, and so very thoughtful, and it makes her heart ache with something heavy and warm.

"I want to see the school," she declares. "And I want you to tell me all about it."

So they climb the hill.

 

* * *

 

Mitt shows her wonders of Hannart she would never have found on her own, and tells her funny stories, and sad stories too. Brid and Kialan had four children, which she knew, but right little devils Mitt calls them fondly, always playing tricks and getting underfoot, and only one turned out to be a proper musician, to Brid's and Moril's profound disappointment. That one moved to Waywold, and opened a shop that sold, out of all things, draperies. 

"Did Moril marry or have children?" Maewen asks anxiously after a moment of undecided hesitation. "I see his portrait all the time in the palace, and it always looks so sad."

Mitt looks sad then too. "No," he says, "not Moril. Not married, anyways. He had women, every once in a while, and two of them each had a baby, and Moril was there for them and did what he could. But he never got over Hestefan betraying his trust, and," Mitt adds significantly, "he never got over you."

"Me!" Maewen exclaims. "Did I betray him somehow?"

"No," Mitt says. "Don't you know he was in love with you too?"

This distresses Maewen so much she can't respond. Moril, in love with her? How had she never noticed! And oh, poor Moril, that she should not love him back, not in the way he wanted, and then that she should disappear back to her own time. And her heart aches, to think of him not married, and not surrounded by happy children, and dying alone.

"He didn't die alone," Mitt says, as if he could hear what she was thinking. "I was with him when it happened. I held his hand."

So, not alone. But still. Poor Moril. Oh, oh, poor Moril. Maewen wishes with her whole heart that he had been happy. She wishes he'd been remembered.

 

* * *

 

After the Festival, they return to Adenmouth, where Maewen makes official introductions between Mitt and Mum and Aunt Liss. Mum thinks Mitt's roughness charming; Aunt Liss is suspicious and reserved. Well, and so she should be, thought Maewen, with a touch of amusement. He had at first been sent to kill her, after all. 

"This is Mitt Alhammittsson," Maewen says. "I met him in Kersnburgh and he wanted to surprise me with his visit." Which wasn't a complete lie, because she had known him in Kernsburgh--two hundred years ago.

Aunt Liss looks at Mitt with narrow, judging eyes. "And what do you do, Mitt? Do you go to university with Maewen?" Aunt Liss looks as if she rather thought not.

"Er," says Maewen, because she hadn't thought of this. She had not, in fact, asked what Mitt did to fill his Undying days, and he certainly wasn't kinging about anymore, with or without purple trousers.

"I do deliveries," Mitt says smoothly, all rough charm. "I've a motorbike, and a sidecar, and deliverymen are in demand in the capital."

Aunt Liss sniffs rather, because she thought motorcycles disreputable too. Aunt Liss only approves of cars, trains, and horses.

Well, Maewen thinks, rather hysterically, and I should wonder if his motorbike isn't the same awful purple as those trousers.

Mum, in her vague, congenial way, takes Mitt's hand and says, "We're so pleased Maewen's settled on someone at last."

_That_  makes Maewen turn bright red.

 

* * *

 

The spring semester comes crawling, and winter with it. Adenmouth is bitterly cold in winter, with the wind coming off the frozen sea, and Maewen returns to Kingsburgh, perched at it is on the Shield of Oreth, with delight. Mitt comes with her. She introduces Mitt to her father, rather delirious because here was Amil the Great, standing in the palace he had built, which he had named after her, and, oh, that's right, their family was also descended from Amil the Great, which makes her and Mitt slightly incestuous, until she stops and thinks about it and shakes herself firmly. She and Mitt aren't the least bit close to even being cousins.

Still, being in the palace with him is hysterical for her.

They walk through the palace afterwards, Mitt pointing things out in a low voice, because sound carried. He and Navis had had a heated argument there over something or other, and there Hildy and Eltruda had had one of their most famous flaming rows. That was Ynen's favorite spot in the whole palace, and there was Moril's. Brid used to dance in this room, and Kialan did his thinking in this one. They came to the big gallery, with that ridiculous painting of Amil the Great in his striding purple trousers, and Mitt barked with laughter. "I forgot he did that!" Mitt exclaimed about his grandson, who was, according to Mitt, a bit ridiculous.

"Who all knew?" Maewen asks, not bothering to specify what they might now. It's obvious.

"Oh," says Mitt, going quiet. "Navis had it puzzled out, obviously." Obviously, that was Navis for you, five steps ahead of everybody else. "Moril knew. Moril saw it happening and he knew the old stories well enough that he knew what was happening. And," he ads, wariness in his voice, "Biffa figured it out too."

Well, and the wariness is no wonder. All of their talks, and Mitt had studiously made an effort never to mention Biffa. Maewen, who has read several of Biffa's surviving journals and written a paper or two on her role in collective bargaining and women's rights during Amil's reign, feels fond and exasperated. Maewen is not unrealistic, and she is not stupid. She does not doubt the authenticity of the records that stated Amil and Enblith were quite fond of one another. And she had had Arik, after all, so how hypocritical would it be for her to be upset that Mitt might have loved Biffa? Or even just that he'd married her.

"I always liked Biffa," Maewen says dryly. _Stop coddling me_ , she thinks at him. _I may be two hundred years younger than you, but I am not stupid, nor am I weak_. "She was smart, and she was kind."

"Yes," Mitt says, taking her meaning with a kind of relief. "Yes, she was." He pauses.

"I miss her," he says.

"Well," says Maewen, taking his head and smiling up at him. "And I miss her too."

 

* * *

 

They get an apartment together. Maewen's friends are agog and a-shock to find her with a man. Aside from Arik, she had always been rather standoffish and disinterested in the other gender, always very committed to her research, and they had thought her the spinster type. They all demand on meeting Mitt. Mitt demands on a party.

"Oh, no, please, you're being ridiculous," Maewen whines. She feels embarrassed for whining, but she does it anyway.

Mitt laughs. "I'm over two hundred years old, and anyway we missed by birthday. I want a party."

So that's that.

It's a housewarming party too, and all of Maewen's friends come, from her department, from archeology, from sociology, from statistics, from political science, from English. Several of her professors come too, including the one who was the Amil expert at King's College, which quite alarms Maewen. He engages Mitt in a hearty conversation about politics, which turns inevitably into a conversation about Amil the Great's reign, because that's just Professor Gannersdaughter's way, to turn everything back around, and Mitt thinks it's all hilarious. Maewen knows he's being entirely honest and truthful about what really happened, but Professor Gannersdaughter thinks he's being ahistorical and assumptive. He had no primary sources, she argued, for what he was claiming. Mitt dances around her arguments, laughter in his eyes.

Professor Gannersdaughter sends Maewen a pained look over Mitt's shoulder, which Maewen understands completely. How could Maewen have allowed herself to be pulled in by such a profound ignoramus of history?

Maewen dissolves into giggles. She blames it on the champagne.

 

* * *

 

They settle into a sort of pattern. Mitt works, and Maewen studies. She teaches classes too, on prehistory and the Riverlands and King Hern, on the founding of Kernsburgh, the Green Roads, the Adon and Manaliabrid. She even gets a class one semester about folklore, and she finds that she enjoys it immensely more than history. Teaching folklore feels like teaching the truth, even though history is what people supposed was the truth. And to Maewen, they were both the truth. So she talks about the spellcoats, and the Weaver and the Wanderer, the Earthshaker and She Who Raised the Islands. Teaching that class makes her feeling light-headed and happy, and she goes to meet with her advisor.

Her advisor is disappointed. She has the right brain for historiography, and such insight into personal politics, and is such an expert on the era of King Hern. She would be wasting that. Maewen does not care. She wouldn't drop her studies of history, but she increases her focus on folklore. She begins to draft what she thinks idly might make for a book of all of the stories and legends of every Undying and folk hero of Dalemark. She makes a chart, and she makes lists. Mitt hovers over her shoulder as she works, watching her frantic writing, and supplies suggestions. She shushes him. She wants to write about things that she can prove. It isn't enough to know it was true. She has to make it seem true. 

It's a challenge she enjoys, thoroughly.

Mitt does deliveries, as he'd told Aunt Liss he did. He does odd other jobs too, fixing things for people, helping them with their problems. He'd learned something of how Alk's Engines worked, he tells Maewen, and he'd been an apprenticed gunsmith in Holand, so he had a knack for the workings of machines. He'd fix a bicycle, or a television, or a microwave. Maewen is quite impressed by that, until he tells her he'd helped Alk invent the bicycle, and she throws frenched fries at him and tells him it was cheating.

"They've evolved since then!" he proclaims with indignity, by way of explanation. "And anyway, that's rich coming from a historian who's actually been back in history!"

They laugh together and fall into each other's arms, and then it's warm and slow and sweet as they press against each other. Maewen is shatteringly happy.

 

* * *

 

Maewen graduates, again with honors. She has offers: from Tannoreth Palace, from the University of Hannart, from Gardale School, from museums in Holand and Andmark and the South Dales. She promises each she'll consider them, and thinks long and hard, and works on her book.

"Let's take a trip," Mitt says. "Let's wander, like Wend does."

Mitt does not actually need money to get by, she had learned these years. He had it secreted away, in this bank and in that, under different names, so that he did not draw attention to himself. Several Undying who do not live recluse lives like Cennoreth or Wend have the same. They take jobs out of boredom. Manaliabrid, Maewen learned, owned a fortune in gemstone stocks.

So they journey. They start on the Green Roads, on the Roads of the Undying, starting in Andmark where Maewen was born and where Mitt and Noreth had first met. They follow the paths they followed two hundred years ago, from Andmark to Loviath, from Loviath to Gardale, from Gardale to Dropwater, from Dropwater to Kernsburgh. At Dropthwaite, Mitt takes her to Cennoreth. Maewen had never managed to find Cennoreth's croft, after that day in the palace with Kankredin, when the ground had erupted with water and Maewen had realized Mitt was still there, and Mitt still loved her.

Cennoreth raises both eyebrows when they enter her croft. It's more modern, now, with an electric stove, and a modern heater, and plumbing, and everything. But still Cennoreth keeps that ancient loom in the corner, the fabric covered in clashing, beautiful colors, and Maewen stares in the same awe she'd felt the first time she'd been here. She stares at Cennoreth, and remembers she's working on connecting Cennoreth to Tanaqui the Weaver. She remembers she's just a person, and half the people in her life who mattered were of the Undying, and the other half were dead.

Cennoreth is brusque and impatient and, in her own way, unfailingly kind. Maewen listens to Mitt needle her, and listens to Cennoreth put Mitt firmly in his place right back, and Maewen wonders if Mitt talks to all of Dalemark's gods this way. Before they leave, she calls Maewen before her alone, and shuts Mitt out. Mitt, insulted, stomps loudly around the front yard, complaining. That makes Maewen smile, but being alone with Cennoreth frightens her. Whatever Cennoreth wants to tell her frightens her.

"I've been very interested in you, you know," Cennoreth says, once she's gotten Maewen to finally sit down and accept a cup of hot tea. "That whole business with Noreth, and you not being Noreth, which sent Duck--Wend, you know him--into such a tantrum, and really I can't blame him for it, but he did act like a right fool afterward. But still. You interested me, and you keep showing up in my weaving."

Maewen starts slightly, her hands curved round the hot mug like it's the only thing that can save her. "I did?"

"Yes," Cennoreth says soberly. "Even once I understood what the weaving said, and you'd returned to your own time. I saw you still. I hesitate to say it this way, because of course it sounds insulting, but you are not normal, Mayelbridwen Singer."

Well, and of course that sounds right. Maewen is not normal. Maewen had spent part of her thirteenth year in the past, and her life has revolved around it since. But still, to be told by Cennoreth, who is probably Tanaqui, who is probably one of the oldest of the Undying, that she is not normal, is rather daunting.

"I have been told I'm odd before," Maewen tries uncertainly. Cennoreth snorts with laughter.

"Odd! I should say," Cennoreth says.

"Why are you telling me this?" Maewen asks She's in awe, but there's a small part of her, a piece she fights, that's fearful.

Cennoreth says, "So that you know it. I am the Weaver of Men's Fates. I do not often tell men their fates, but yours is so unusual, I wanted you to know."

Well. And that feels a bit better.

 

* * *

 

After Dropwater is Kernsburgh, of course, where they hardly stay because they've lived there so many years, and after that is Flennpass, and then the South. Maewen has not been South much. She's interested in Holand, for obvious reasons, and the South Dales, for other obvious reasons, but much of the history that intrigues her had not happened in the South. This was a new, rich experience for her, and Mitt is fairly vibrating with excitement to show it to her.

"We have to go to the Holy Isles first," Mitt insisted. "We've got to, Maewen, we've just got to. I let you decide what we do most of it, but really we've just got to go. You haven't lived until you've seen the Isles."

So they go to the Isles. They stop in Neathdale first, and Mitt tells her about Kialan's hair-pulling escape from the South with Moril's family. She knew about Kialan's brief imprisonment in Holand, of course, because there were court records that had survived the Uprising, and Moril of course had told her much of the rest. But she feels sad all over again, remembering Moril's disdainful fear of Southerners, and all over again, that horrible betrayed look on his face when he found out Hestefan had killed Noreth, had tried to kill Maewen.

"Wasn't this Moril's brother's seat?" Maewen asks. "I remember that coat of arms on his cart."

"Yes, Dagner," Mitt says. "He avoided it for as long as he could until I retook the South and asked him to go back. He chafed at the bit, but he did it. I did like Dagner."

The gaps in the things Maewen knew tended to fill in like that. History said: Tholian, Earl of the South Dales, died in an attempted invasion of the North. His legal heir was his something-nephew-something-removed, son of the Lord of Markind. The heir stayed away in the North until King Amil asked him to take up his earldom. The Earl's name was Dastgandlen Handagner. His history was largely unknown. 

And so Mitt fills in those blanks for her, those great gaping blanks. Dagner had been Clennen the Singer's eldest son, Moril's older brother, and he'd led them North after Clennen was murdered. He was arrested for conspiracy and Moril and Brid and Kialan made it North. Dagner was rescued by the Lord of Markind, who had married their mother, and he made for North shortly after--with Hestefan, of all people.

Maewen wishes she could put this all into writing. She wishes she could put it in a book. She wants to make Moril and his family real for people. Everyone knew of Brid, who had been Countess of Hannart, and Dagner, who had been Earl of the South Dales, but no one knew of Moril. Moril's life was the biggest blank of all. Mitt could tell her, and tell her, and he hesitated to make her sad, but she begged him to tell her, because she felt she owed Moril so much. She could never get that portrait out of her mind. Even his own school did not remember him.

They move on from Neathdale to Markind, and from Markind to Carrow. At Carrow, rather than finding the usual tourist trolly, Mitt insists they find a Holy Islander going home to book passage with, so they do. The man's name is Calan, and his boat is small. It's an old-fashioned sort of boat, with a small crew, and Maewen and Mitt get a cabin to themselves. For no reason she can explain, Maewen bursts into tears.

"What is it!" Mitt cries, his arms coming up around her while Maewen sobs and sobs. "Maewen, what's the matter?"

"I don't--I don't know, exactly," she heaves out, clinging to him and getting the front of his shirt all wet. "It's. I think it's just, the whole, bloody South. The South makes me sad."

Well. And the South makes Mitt sad too, and he understands. His memories of the South are not happy.

They haven't talked about Hobin yet. Like the hole where a loose tooth should be--that is Hobin to them. Maewen is afraid to ask, and Mitt is shy of the topic. Of course Maewen knows what happened--she knows what is documented that happened--but she also knows Mitt must have so many feelings on the topic. Maewen remembers being in year 10 and getting to the Great Uprising in history class, and the teacher writing HOBIN THE BLOODY on the chalkboard in big, bold letters. She remembers her heart sinking down into her stomach, and a memory flashing into her head of the man painted on the ceiling of that room in Tannoreth Palace, the wild man in the ragged furs.

They will reach Holand eventually, and eventually it will come out.

And Maewen will be there to hold him.

 

* * *

 

The Holy Isles are everything Mitt promised they would be, and nothing like what he'd said.

Nothing can prepare you for them, Maewen reflects. Mitt had told her about his perfect land he'd dreamed of as a child, and he'd told her about his arrival in the Isles that first time, and the peculiar Islanders, and Old Ammett and Libby Beer. 

The smell is unbelievable. Mitt's descriptions cannot do it justice. It is salt, and sea, and wild green growing things; it is peat and fruit, wildflowers, life. The smell itself is holy. Maewen stands at the prow of the ship and watches the islands pass in wonder.

"This is the Isle of Gard," the captain tells them, "the homeland of the Isles. And beyond we have Lathsay, and there is Trossaver--"

Mitt stands beside her, looking nothing at all like weariness or age, looking young and vibrant and whole. He laughs, and whoops, and takes her hand and spins her about, and they both breathe in the fresh, wild, wonderful air.

"--and there the three Ganter Isles, and there is Doen, and there Diddersay, and there Holy Isle, the holiest of all."

Here Mitt spins her around again, and smiles, and bows before the captain. "We'll have off here, if you please, and a boat on the other side to take us to Gard."

Cheeky! Maewen thinks watching him, ordering people about in such a polite way. Who hasn't been king for years!

But the captain just looks at Mitt with a long, steady, placid look, and says deferentially, "Alhammitt," and just like that they're on a little dinghy sailing to the island. The dinghy is to meet them on the other side.

"I want you to know them," Mitt says urgently, holding tight to her hands. "I don't want to be the only one who knows them. I want you to know them too." And Maewen clutches his hands back and knows that he means. Alone, he is, after everyone from his time is gone, and all he has left is other wild, impossible people, with wild, impossible powers, and Maewen maybe the only person in the present time who believes in any of them. Maybe Mitt has felt a bit mad since everyone else died. Maybe he wants someone else to believe with him too. Maybe the _knowing_  is just too much to bear alone.

Maybe he just wants her to know why that one word, shouted so many years ago, tore a palace apart.

 

* * *

 

They stay in the Holy Isles for three weeks, feasting on weekly feast days and swimming in the warm brackish water and laughing and sleeping in late and rolling about in bed. It is the happiest Maewen has been in her entire life.

She understands why Mitt loves this place so, and she is glad she hasn't come here until coming here with him.

They leave and set out for Canderack. It isn't _quite_ following the rule--the rule was to follow the path of Mitt's journey, south to north but in reverse, but Maewen doesn't want to be on the sea for that long and miss the sights of people, and Mitt follows Maewen's pleasure. She feels a little guilty about it, but she knows if she brings it up, they will only argue, and he will insist they do what she wants. So she doesn't say anything, and in Canderack they land.

They don't stay in Canderack long. Historically, it isn't very remarkable, although Mitt talks about getting very, very drunk with Navis at the Earl's mansion when they'd been here on campaign. Mitt's account of drunk Navis is desperately funny; he'd gone philosophical, apparently, speaking in great detail about Dameron the Cunning and King Hern's Sayings and talking about the differences between kings and earls. The idea of Navis even being drunk in the first place is beyond hysterical to Maewen.

Holand is a trial. They pay for horses at Canderack, just for the feeling of the thing, and take the horses down the horse trails to Holand. The closer they get to Holand, the more old-looking Mitt's face gets. Maewen gets the feeling he never comes here if he doesn't have to, and she feels painfully that she's done something awful to Mitt by dragging him here. But no--it had been his idea in the first place, and she had only agreed.

They pass the Flate, rich with growth and wealthy-looking farms, and Mitt lifts a level, bony finger, and points where his family's farm was. "My father was a right piece of work," he says calmly, his face pinched and a crease of unhappiness there in it, "but we were happy there."

The closer they get to Holand, the quieter Mitt becomes, until Maewen finds herself chattering just to fill the air. "I say!" she says, pointing at an inn. "That house looks about as old as the time of the Adon! Yes, I'm sure of it, look at the brickwork, it must certainly be that old." And, "Did you see the curve of that stream? I'm sure the variation in the soil color of the bank must indicate the stream changed course within the last century at least. Look, that mill seems to have moved, do you see the drowned-out building a few meters away?"

Mitt is quiet. He looks at Holand quietly, with a seam of worry in the side of his face. Maewen wishes desperately she could make that seam go away.

"I don't come to Holand if I can help it," he finally admits, and they spur their horses forward.

 

* * *

 

They stop first at a livery stable, to dispose of their horses.

Maewen takes her time saying farewell to hers, because it's a fine mare with good character, and she does miss Aunt Liss's stables. She's a good twenty minutes murmuring to it, and Mitt is patient, and eventually she pulls herself away.

Mitt takes her hand very fast. He looks around the city with wild, animal eyes, and Maewen wonders that sort of violence he's seeing. The violence of the sack of Holand is well-documented. There are accounts of rape, and cannibalism, and mutilation; Maewen remembers the stories that Hobin murdered his own wife and daughters before he killed himself. Mitt is jumpy as a hare. Maewen, to her shame, takes it as a comfort that two hundred years does not dull one's feelings to tragedy.

"I want to see where you grew up," she tells Mitt, to give him direction, and also because it's true. Mitt does not bring her to Dike End, which is too far away for walking, but he does bring her to the waterfront streets where the tenements once were. They've been razed since then--they were toppled before Hadd's assassination, Mitt tells her, a touch of irony to his voice--but houses have been raised there since, and right fine houses they are. Mitt looks at them with a touch of disgust, because they are so fine. Maewen pulls him against her and holds him tight. She thinks of Mitt growing up on the lip of this harbor, and she whispers to him that it's no wonder Aunt Liss looks at him as if he's so disreputable when this looks like such a disreputable place, and he barks with laughter. He clings to her like she's the only thing in the world.

They leave the tenements and move on to a different district, a sober, respectable-looking part of the city, with an odd assortment of buildings, some looking quite old and others looking keenly new. Maewen absorbs it all with curiosity, Mitt's hand tight in hers. This is where he lived with Hobin, she has gathered, and this is why it pains him so. He is tight as a wire beside her, her hand losing circulation in his tight grip. She doesn't complain. She leans toward him, rests her head on his shoulder as they walk, which is a very awkward position for walking because he's so tall, but she does it anyway.

They stop outside a house.

It's a stout house, well-built, quite old-looking. It has the look of a house that was once shabby and poor but has been spruced up a bit and improved upon. Mitt looks at it with horrible trapped eyes.

Maewen asks gently, "Do you want to knock and see if they'll let us inside?"

It's a wild thing to ask because neither of them knows how long the current family has owned the house. Say it's been in their family for a hundred years, and they knock on the door and say, "Yes, hello, so sorry to bother you, but my boyfriend used to live in this house when he was young, and we would be desperately happy if you would show us around." And of course they would look crazy because Mitt looks barely thirty, and the family would have been there for long more than thirty years. But Maewen asks anyway, not minding that it would make her look mad.

"No," Mitt says, his voice painfully quiet. "I just want to look at it."

And what did happen to his sisters, really? she wonders. The common tale is that Hobin murdered them, and murdered his own wife, Mitt's mother, before killing himself. But many historians dispute that. Maewen runs through the arguments in her mind, runs through what she knows of the Uprising in Holand in her mind. They stand there for a good thirty minutes until someone comes anxiously through the front door and approaches them.

"Excuse me," the girl says warily," can I help you?"

Mitt still has that painful lost look, and Maewen starts. "Oh, yes, I'm so terribly sorry," she babbles, feeling at a loss for what to say. I'm so sorry, only the man who lived in this house two hundred years ago may have murdered the only family of Amil the Great before killing himself, and we're quite caught up in the tragedy of that. I'm so sorry, only your house was once the house of a bloodthirsty madman.

"I'm a history student," Maewen babbles instead. "I have a graduate degree from King's College. And I know this is where Hobin lived, you know, and I'm so sorry for being such a tourist."

The girl looks mollified, and chagrined, and also anxious and a bit disgusted. Her family must be used to this kind of attention from tourists. What must it be like, Maewen wonders, to live in the house of a man known for his murders?

"Well, I appreciate you wanted to see our house, but you're making my family quite anxious," the girl says, wringing her hands. "Please, would you move along? Whatever this house was, we are quite ordinary, and we'd rather not be bothered."

Maewen dithers an apology, and pulls Mitt along, that horrible painful lost look still on his face.

They stop several streets down, closer to the waterfront, and Maewen pulls him into her arms. Mitt is frozen, and then he is shaking, and then he starts crying, holding her tight and crying. Maewen wonders what it must have been like to have a man who was a father who did such awful things. Two men who were fathers like that, she thinks, remembering him telling her of Al. Two awful fathers. And to have abandoned his mother and sisters, and not to know whether they were killed by his father or not. She rubs Mitt's back and whispers soothing noises into his ear and kisses his face and tells him how much she loves him.

This is the first time she's told him she loves him. Somehow it's gone unsaid all this time.

Mitt calms, after several minutes, tugging his fingers through her hair. He rests his chin on her shoulder and breathes into her ear. Her shoulder is damp. Maewen clutches at him desperately and kisses his cheek. He is so warm, and heavy, and so sad.

To carry that kind of sadness with you. For two hundred years.

"I was terrible to him," Mitt says in a shuddering voice. "To Hobin. I never respected him until it was too late."

Maewen is quiet, and holds him, and lets him speak.

"He knew I was up to something stupid with that bomb. When I came back to the house to filch a gun, he was there waiting, even though I thought we'd fooled him, and he gave me a gun anyway. Said he'd have lied himself blue that I was with him when I dropped the stupid thing, but for Milda and the girls. Said he'd make a better revolutionary than I thought I'd ever be." Mitt laughs darkly. "Well, he did after all, didn't he."

"Oh, Mitt," Maewen cries, holding him close. "Oh, Mitt, it's not your fault, none of it is."

"He killed my sisters!" Mitt hisses against her, his face buried against her neck. "Or Holand did, or Harl, but it doesn't matter. It was my fault. I picked that war, and Holand rose to meet it. And people died. People died because of _my_ choices, Maewen." His voice is ragged and hoarse with crying. "I don't even remember their names."

Maewen can think of nothing to say to that. So she just holds him, and lets him cry, and kisses his face, and tells him how much she loves him.

It's true that she loves him. It's always been true.

 

* * *

 

Mitt is not--brighter, after that. But he is surer. They go to Earl Hadd's palace, and Mitt talks of Hildy and Ynen, of Navis, of Siriol and Dideo, of Holand after the war. He talks of how desolate Navis had felt walking back into Holand after the Uprising, how Ynen had sailed one of his first steamships here, of Siriol becoming mayor. He talks about Siriol with such pride you'd think Mitt had been the master and Sirol the apprentice. Well, Maewen reflects, maybe in a way that was how it was. When Mitt didn't know what fear was, Mitt taught others how to be free.

They leave Holand. They'd planned to go north landward, towards Derent and up through Crady, but Holand had distressed Mitt so. Maewen becomes cheerful and bubbly, talking on and on about the Holy Isles, and how beautiful they were, and how at peace she'd felt there, and Mitt is not fooled, but he is content to be fooled. They hire a boat and sail back to the Holy Isles.

They stay there for a month. Mitt spends much of his time on Holy Isle, and Maewen spends much of her time talking with the Holy Islanders, notebook in hand, jotting down every story she can dredge from them of Old Ammitt and Libby Beer and the Piper, and more too. She'd decided her book was really going to be a book. Regardless of what she chooses to do next, she will publish it, and make her mark on things.

When Mitt comes back from Holy Isle the last time, at the end of their month, he looks peaceful. "Did they help?" Maewen asks anxiously, and Mitt just says, "Yes." She knows she will not get more of an answer, so she does not press for one. She is just glad that horrible painful look is gone from his face. It gave him a pucker on the side, a horrible little crease of unhappiness, and she wishes she could be the one to have made it go away, but she also knows she's not the one for that.

 

* * *

 

They return to their little apartment in Kernsburgh. Maewen sets out her offers in a list, one by one by one, weighing each against the other. She knows their future is based on what she decides here, because Mitt has made it quite clear he has no feeling on the matter and will follow where she goes.

She decides on a museum in Kinghaven that has a robust collection of artifacts from the Riverlands and prehistoric Haliglanders. The museum director wrings her hands at her interview and proclaims her thesis one of the finest studies of Kernsian history he's read in years. "I know we're a tad unglamorous, not out digging up the relics to be housed here," he says, beaming at her from behind a pair of large spectacles, "but I'm terribly pleased you're considering us."

They hunt for an apartment, and move there three weeks later. Mum and Aunt Liss drive to Kernsburgh to rent a van, and Dad comes along to help. Mum and Dad are dreadfully sarcastic to one another through the whole move. Maewen can hardly stand it, she fizzes with embarrassment so. Mitt brims with amusement at her suffering.

She starts her job at the museum and settles into a new routine, guiding tours and planning special exhibits, overseeing the meticulous care of centuries-old artifacts, and mentoring students. The Museum of Kinghaven has one of the finest collections of Riverlands artifacts in the country, and students of all levels travel from all over the country to visit. The university students listen to her with rapt attention, awed by her expertise, but it's working with the very young students that makes Maewen's heart race. She'd been indifferent to history, before her adventure. And these children can't have the same adventure she did, but she can teach them to love history. She takes great pleasure in painting pictures for them with words of the disastrous Heathen campaign, of Hern's unexpected crowning as king, of his victory over the rogue Heathen mages and his campaigns in the south. She's quite good at making Hern sound as epic as he was. She accounts it to those lurid novels she loves reading.

And she works on her book. It's the same one she'd started writing before they'd left Kernsburgh, of the Undying and their stories. She wishes she could find some way to link Cennoreth to Tanaqui of the spellcoats, because she knows Cennoreth was Tanaqui, because Wend had called her so. She's failing miserably. There's just so little proof. Instead she throws herself into corresponding with the uncommonly few other folklorists, pulling in their thirdhand tales of Agner the Smith, of the tales of Manaliabrid that follow after the death of the Adon. She pays very, very careful attention to how she describes the One.

Mitt takes a job on the docks, loading and unloading cargo. He's delighted to be living on the sea again.

 

* * *

 

They're happy, for such a long while. Maewen can't believe how happy they are. Aunt Liss comes round to Mitt eventually, and dad--Maewen had been surprised about dad's reservations. Dad is polite and distant, as usual, but Aunt Liss begins to pester her about marriage and children. You won't be happy until you marry, you know, Aunt Liss tells her. You won't be happy until you have children.

Which is rich! Coming from Aunt Liss, who never married, and never had any babies. Maewen is quite content as she is, with Mitt. Marriage seems so permanent, and nothing is permanent for anyone who's Undying. Mitt had already married once. Maewen feels quite shaky and freckly at the thought of making him go through it again. Better that they don't. Better that they just be.

So they just be. For a long several years, in their happy apartment in Kinghaven, Maewen working at the museum and working on her book. It's quite coming on now. She's pretty certain she's compiled all of the stories there are to be had of the Weaver, the Earthshaker, She Who Raised the Islands, and the Piper. There are quite a few more stories about Manaliabrid, and the Wanderer--because Maewen knows how many name's he's gone by, and does not know how many he's not. She's quite stuck on Gann, who might be Gull of the spellcoats, and she refuses, absolutely refuses, to ask Mitt if he's of the Undying. She wants to puzzle it out by herself. She wants to uncover something.

Her father sends her the latest copy of their family tree.

He has finally, decisively, concluded that they are, in fact, descended from the Singer Clennen. Only he can't seem to be able to determine which of Clennen's children is next in the family tree. Dastgandlen Handagner had been Earl of the South Dales, and his three children and their children well-recorded. Cennoreth Manaliabrid Clennensdaughter likewise became Countess of Hannart and had four children with the Earl. Maewen feels her heart thudding loudly.

"Mightn't there have been a third child," she suggests to her father on their next phone call, several weeks later, "one not recorded because he or she wasn't of political import?"

"Hmmmmmm," her father says, considering the idea quite strongly. He had, after all, pointed out that Singers were quite hard to trace, given the lack of first party sources documenting them.

Maewen is alarmed suddenly by quite how quickly her father is considering this idea. Maewen's head is in a whirl. She'd suggested it off handedly, but now she's seriously looking at it. Might she be descended from Moril? What did this make them? It still makes her sad. Thinking of Moril always makes her sad, except when it's happy, and even then it still makes her sad again. _Oh_ , she thinks, _oh, poor Moril_.

It alarms her still, to think her father might start digging into a part of her past. It wasn't Maewen's past, not really, but she'd lived it in her way. She'd known Moril, and Moril might be her great-great-great-great-grand-something.

She cries to Mitt that night, great, heaving, violent cries. He holds her and lets her wet his shirt. He murmurs and tells her how brave and loving she is. Maewen doesn't feel brave and loving, but it feels good to be told she is. She feels a coward. She feels she's abandoned something important, and made so many things terrible.

Mitt pats her hair. He runs his fingers through her hair, untangling the knots, trying to make it lie straight. The strands tug at her scalp, pulling her away from her grief. She sniffles. She buries her face into his shoulder and lets him tug, tug, tug.

"I think he would have been sad either way," Mitt tells her, his voice a quiet murmur. "It wasn't just you, or just Hestefan. Something was ending then." He pauses. "He was always so sensitive."

And so he was, Maewen thinks. Wasn't he just. He felt everything. 

"I saw his portrait in the palace," she says weakly, dribbling snot all over Mitt's shirt. "Before Wend sent me back. I saw his portrait, and I thought, how sad this boy looks, and I wanted him to be happy."

"Well," Mitt says, caring not the least that there is snot on his shirt, "I think he would be very happy to know he made you."

 

* * *

 

They go on together, Mitt doing his odd jobs, Maewen working on the museum and working on her book. She has a new steadfast dedication to not asking Mitt for help. She wants to puzzle everything out on her own. She takes trips for research, and sometimes Mitt goes with her. He offers to introduce her to some of the subjects of her research, and she says no, thank you, that would really be quite alarming. She wants to make the stories fit, before she knows what the stories are.

At long last, she finishes her book

In some ways, she's been working on it since she was thirteen, so it's the longest project of her life. Her father and her professors from university are disappointed she's focused her energies on such a subject. They'd had such hope she would uncover the location of King Hern's stand against the Heathens, find the lost remains of Kars Adon, discover the place where the Adon had hidden.

Her graduate degree is in history. But it's the folklore that's clung to her heart.

So she's compiled the stories of the Weaver, the Piper, the Smith, the Wanderer, She Who Raised the Islands, the Earthshaker, the One. There are others, she knows, in her heart of hearts, there are others. But she can't prove them. This is what she can prove. Not that it's real, but, at least, that it exists. That the stories exist. She wishes other people believed in them, but she's probably alone now. She and Mitt alone tip their beer out at Midsummer.

She finishes her book, and it is published.

 

* * *

 

Mitt watches her anxiously. Maewen turns thirty-five, and then thirty-six. Mitt has been preparing himself, all these years, for greys in her hair. He dreads the greys in her hair. He'd asked Cennoreth once, "How do you do it?" and Cennoreth had said, "You don't, really. You just muddle through it." And he is afraid of muddling through it.

He waited two hundred years for her, and he has centuries of grief lying ahead of him.

He watches and watches. Eventually, he forgets what he's watching for.

They do silly things together, and normal things together. They go hiking outside Gardale, lay out all night on a blanket watching a meteor shower. They find dance parties, and they go together, Mitt having learned the proper steps two hundred years ago but not keeping up through the years, and Maewen only knowing the steps they introduced in her youth. They bump against each other, and tangle together, and laugh heartily. 

Maewen laughs harder than she has all her life.

He tells her other stories, stories he's never told her before; some stories he's been afraid to tell her. The day Kialan proposed to Brid, how Brid had been crying all through. The day Mitt called Moril as Court Musician. The song Moril had played that day, so sad and fast, like the river. One of Moril's ladies, beautiful, but not sad enough, not sad enough for Moril. How he'd cloaked himself in sadness.

How many loved ones has he seen die, Maewen wonders. Moril. Biffa. Navis. Hildy. Ynen. Kialan. Brid. How many more?

Maewen hopes when she dies, it doesn't pain him too greatly. She wishes him another two hundred years.

 

* * *

 

The possibility of something unexpected and impossible begins to creep up on them, like a small warm spring breeze at their backs. Mitt looks young and hopeful by the day. That nervous puckered look smooths itself away, and easy smiles come back in their place.

Maewen, Maewen feels punched, the air thrown clean out of her.

It just seems so impossible, and so silly, because she's so perfectly ordinary ( _Yes_ , a voice inside her that sounds like Mitt says archly, _because being sent back in time by the One to crown Amil the Great is perfectly ordinary._ ), and she's assumed, just assumed, that there was only one way this could end.

And as the invisible bruise of that punch fades, and breathing comes easier again, something else comes with it. Two something elses.

Bright hope and a keening sense of despair.

She sits down on the floor with a hard thump. Mitt is beside her before she can even blink. Her eyes are dry, but when she speaks, her voice is weak and thin. "My father," she says. "My mother. Aunt Liss. Everybody."

"I know," Mitt says.

Maewen looks at him with wide, wild eyes. 

"I know," he says, and pulls her against him.

 

* * *

 

They get a charm from Cennoreth for Maewen, to make her look like she's aging, and one for Mitt too, so he can look as if he's aging with her\\. Cennoreth is still austere, and terse, and, in her way, unfailingly kind. She has also been through the loss. Tanaqui, Maewen remembers Wend calling her. And the spellcoats said they'd have siblings.

How many of them were still alive?

Maewen takes her charm, a little wristband, and feels a bit delirious. The Weaver of the spellcoats just made be a bracelet, she thinks. What would Dad say?

But the thought of Dad has been troubling her. He's not well. He's old, and, he has a tumor in his liver, and it's getting on. He's not often clear. He retired from the Palace two years ago, and still he works stolidly on that family tree. He's determined it must reach back to the Riverlands, if he can make writing go back that far. Half the time he can't even read the pages he tries to study.

She visits him every other weekend in Kernsburgh. Of course, as a long-time servant of the Queen, and now the King, he's entitled to the very best care. Maewen sits at his bedside and holds his hand in both her own. She'd begged Mitt to stay home. She wants to be here and feel like a normal daughter. After all, daughters lose their fathers all the time. One does not need to be magically able to live several centuries beyond one's father to hold his hand in his sickbed, and cry.

"Oh, Maewen," he says, turning away from his charts of births and deaths and odd scribbled notes, "Mayelbridwen."

She hunches over his hand, and holds it tight, She can't stop the tears, because it has to do with him. She was always close to Aunt Liss than to Mum, but her fondness for Dad goes something deeper. Her fondness for Dad goes to being thirteen, and coming to in a saddle in the midst of a fog, clad in leather and mail, the Green Roads stretching beneath her horse's feet. It was thanks to him that everything important in her life ever happened.

She wishes she could be Manaliabrid now, and sing, in her own awful voice, some song that could bring him back. But it wasn't Osfameron who saved the Adon, after all, it was Cennoreth, and Maewen has no magic. Her father falls asleep with his hand clasped between her own, and she starts to cry. 

"I think I'm one of the Undying, Dad," she tells him between her tears. "I think I'm going to go on living forever. Dad, I'm so sorry. Dad, I wish I could have told you the truth. I crowned King Amil," she says, pleadingly, desperately. "We were hiding from Earl Henda's army when his crown fell off, and I picked it up and put it back on his head. Navis and Keril were astounded to find us like that."

Dad, half asleep, says, "What? Say that again," and then snores again, full back into sleep. Maewen just cries.

 

* * *

 

He dies three months later. Before the funeral Maewen throws herself against Mitt and sobs, great heaving sobs, nothing like what a normal person might cry. A normal person might thing, _We will be together again_. A faithful person might thing, _My soul will go down the river into the sea to meet yours_. Maewen is both and neither. Maewen does not know if she will ever die, and if she does, she does not know what happens to the Undying when death comes. All she knows is that her father is dead. The rest is theory.

Mum comes to the funeral, and Aunt Liss, which is a comfort. They see nothing unusual about Maewen, because she wears the charm Cennoreth gave her, and she looks appropriately forty. The rest of the family is standoffish towards Mitt for never marrying her, and Maewen is rather surprised by his patience. He doesn't appreciate insults to her honor.

"They're old fashioned," Mitt says with a pinched look, holding her in his arms. Calling someone old-fashioned is ironic coming from him. "And anyway, their opinions mean nothing, because they don't know the names to swear them under."

 

* * *

 

The years move on. Mum dies when Maewen is fifty-two, and then Aunt Liss when Maewen is sixty. Somehow Maewen always knew stubborn Aunt Liss would be the last one to go. She takes some small comfort in the knowledge that she'd be grieving for them anyway, because daughters usually outlive parents, and nieces usually outlive aunts. She keeps up her work at the museum, grasping for that normalcy she's morosely suffered with all her life. 

One day she comes to Mitt. She's sixty-five now, and tired. "I think I need to go away," she tells him.

He takes her meaning perfectly. "As Maewen?" he asks. "Or someone else?"

"Someone else."

"And shall I come with you?" he asks. He does not look worried, only patient and understanding.

"Oh, Mitt," she says. "I don't know how I should bear it without you."

Maewen makes a story to the museum about taking a leave to work on a new book. They promise to hold the position open for her. Maewen demurs and says she doesn't know how long it should take. "Don't make exceptions for me," she tells the new director, who'd replaced the old director some years back when he'd retired. "There are plenty of bright young minds who could do well here, and I need some time to myself." When they ask her where she's going, she tells them Dropwater.

But she doesn't go to Dropwater. They go to Diddersay. Mitt owns a small house there, with a tiny garden in the back. They spend a good week cleaning the dust and age around the house, and stocking up on enough food that they can be alone for a while. The locals all dip their heads to him, and say, "Alhammitt," with a touch of reverence to their voices. Mitt says they don't all believe all the old stories anymore the way they used to, but they're still superstitious. But there are one or two grey elders who recognize him, and keep their humble silence.

 

* * *

 

It's peaceful in the Isles. Maewen lets the years pass her by. She knows they won't be able to stay here forever, but they can stay here long enough.

Mitt spends much of his time in the garden, clipping down vegetable leaves, making compost, tearing up weeds. He confesses to Maewen that before he became king, he wanted to be a farmer. Sometimes Maewen helps him in his garden, but she gets so beneath his feet that she flees back inside to her books. 

Other times, Mitt takes a small boat out onto the blue-green waters around their island and sets his lines for fish. Maewen spends those hours sitting in a chair on the front porch, a large-brimmed hat on her head keeping the sun out, and her eyes closed. She doesn't sleep: she just remembers. She buries into her memories, looking into them like jewels, twisting them about like they're rings on her finger, looking at each one closely, carefully. She's determined not to forget a detail. She's determined everyone she's lost will live on with her.

They're happy there, in a way. Mitt has found his peace; he found it many years ago. For Maewen, being here is about finding her peace. She spends her time writing. Nothing grand or epic, but she has a robust library she's collected over the years, and she spends her time reading and writing idle half-thoughts and reflections on this book or that. She doesn't intend to publish anything, but the act of writing brings her a sort of peace. 

Peace is what they came here for. It takes Maewen decades, but eventually she kinds it, or something like it.

"How long did it take you?" she asks Mitt one night, as they're curled up around one another in bed, Maewen's forehead pressed against his chest and Mitt's hands in her hair. He does love her hair. "After everyone died, how long did it take you to stop aching?"

"Too long," Mitt says. "And the ache's never really left. But I had help, from Cennoreth and Ammett and Libby Beer. And I'm here to help you."

She thinks on that for the rest of the night, and falls asleep in his arms.

 

* * *

 

More years pass, Maewen writing, Mitt gardening and fishing. They can't stay on Diddersay forever. Eventually the locals will notice the old man who keeps fishing despite his ancient age. They will notice the couple that grows old but never dies.

Maewen is ninety-five. Mitt, of course, is much older.

And Maewen is restless now. It's time for a change.

They slip out in the night, Mitt softly paddling a boat away from Diddersay towards the Isle of Gard. On the water, they stop. Mitt pulls his bracelet charm from his wrist, and Maewen pulls her bracelet charm from hers. Their ages melt away as they drop the charms into the water.

"Where to?" Mitt asks, looking at Maewen's eyes, solemn and bright.

"I'll let you decide this time," she says.

There's a boat docked in harbor at the Isle of Gard, a modest little tourist boat, like a hostel on water. They board quietly and pay for their passage with a night guard. In the morning, the boat blows a whistle and pulls out from the harbor. Mitt and Maewen go up to the bow. Maewen leans against it, her elbows braced against the cold metal, chilly in the misty morning, and Mitt wraps his arms around her stomach.

"So," Maewen asks, "where are we going now?"

 

Mitt dips his head to bury his face against her neck, even though her hair tickles his nose that way. His breath moves against her ear, and she shivers deliciously, feeling young again for the first time in ages.

 

"Wherever the wind's road takes us," he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Dalemark is my favorite out of everything Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote.
> 
> Thank you to every other person who has written Dalemark fanfic. I've read so much in the past few weeks I can't keep it all straight, but there was someone who remarked in author's notes that they didn't think Maewen would study history because it's too personal, and I thank you for that insight into her character. I started out with Maewen as a history major focusing on the Great Uprising, but your fic made me realize that if Maewen were to focus on history, it would be history she doesn't already know, history she's not connected to.
> 
> I'm really tired of the idea in the Dalemark fandom that Maewen isn't Undying. There's so much beautiful fanfic where Maewen is a normal person, and I love it all. But I want a vision where Maewen and Mitt get to make up their time together forever. I want a Maewen who is more than normal. I just want these kids to be happy. I want them to be together. The codices say new Undying come every couple of hundred years, and well, there's two hundred between Mitt and Maewen. Maewen is extraordinary. She shouldn't be lost to time.
> 
> So basically, this is self-indulgent, and I hope you liked it.


End file.
